Rebel Britannia

3rd December 1944:

When he was in his nineties, former Labour leader Michael Foot was asked by the BBC how he would have reacted if Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, had made peace with Hitler in 1940. "I'd have killed him," said Footy. And he wasn't speaking metaphorically.

In the run-up to world war two a number of unorthodox left-wingers had come to the conclusion that Britain could only win against Germany if it underwent a socialist revolution. This would inevitably involve a degree of civil war and the formation of workers' militias.

As it turned out, of course, they were wrong. The UK remained capitalist - although forced, for the sake of efficiency and productivity, to temporarily adopt some socialistic measures - and yet successfully resisted invasion. But at the time, their views made a lot of sense to a lot of people.

Only a minority faction of the British ruling class was anti-Nazi, people like Foot reasoned; the rest were either fascists themselves, or saw Nazism as a useful tool against socialism, or else weren't bothered either way as long as their dividends continued to pay out. As soon as the war started going badly, these people would seize the opportunity to dump Churchill and open peace talks with their German chums. The revolution's first task, therefore, would be to execute the quislings, beginning with the man universally expected to be their leader, Lord Halifax.

As well as Foot, a left-wing journalist from a radical liberal background, leading members of this hotchpotch of dissenting eccentrics included playwright J.B. Priestley, whose radio broadcasts early in the war made him arguably the most influential voice in the nation; many historians credit Priestley's insistence on "war aims" (we know what we're fighting against, but what are we fighting for?) with laying much of the ideological groundwork for the 1945 Labour landslide. Unsurprisingly, the government pressured the BBC to drop Priestley after a few months.

Also part of this disparate crew was writer George Orwell, the ultimate contrarian, who seems to have held it as a sacred principle that he should personally dislike and politically despise every other socialist he ever met. The liberals who revere him today would be shaken to learn that he hated the Communists not only because he considered them undemocratic, but also because they were too moderate. In Spain in 1937 and in Britain in 1940, according to Orwell, conditions were ripe for an armed socialist revolution and it was only the sell-out Communist Party that stopped it.

The mainstream left in Spain and Britain insisted the immediate priority was destroying fascism, and that nothing should distract from that. More than 80 years later it's still a debate which is rarely conducted without raised voices.

Most immediately influential of all this group was Tom Wintringham, an early and prominent member of the British Communist Party, though by this time he'd been expelled, supposedly because his wife was suspected of being a Trotskyist spy. He'd served in the first world war, been jailed in 1925 as part of a round-up of CP leaders, and at one point commanded the British Battalion in the Spanish Civil War.

Now Wintringham, too, became a media personality, in his case by writing about "irregular" warfare. Most people agreed that German occupation of Britain, whether by conquest or treachery, was virtually inevitable. Conventional warfare, many believed, could not prevail against the German blitzkrieg strategy, but guerilla warfare might - both against the occupiers and the traitors.

It's unthinkable today, but Wintringham wrote not only strategic and tactical articles, but even how-to pieces, for the likes of the Daily Mirror and the Picture Post and in bestselling books. Under headlines such as "Arm The Citizens" and "An Aroused People, An Angry People, An Armed People," he told his millions of readers how to make hand grenades, destroy bridges and kill parachutists.

His ideology of revolutionary patriotism chimed with the times, attracting widespread support well beyond the rebel left. It seems clear now that without Wintringham's writing and lobbying, there may never have been a "Dad's Army," the Home Guard. As it was, primed by his talk of "a people in arms," when the government called for volunteers for the new organisation in May 1940, more than a million men signed up in just six weeks. (And many women; they weren't officially allowed to join, but they did so anyway.)

In July, Wintringham was lent Osterley Park, a stately home in Isleworth, to use as a school for training Home Guard members in guerilla warfare and street fighting. Its owner, the Earl of Jersey, apparently asked Wintringham to avoid blowing the house up if at all possible, as "it's been in my family for some time."

Thousands of Home Guards attended two-day courses at Osterley in arts including camouflage and manufacturing explosives from household items, but the security services weren't enormously keen on having such a place run by a Marxist who talked openly of imminent revolution. Wintringham and his comrades were edged out, and the government took over. Even so, "the prophet of the Home Guard" had, almost incredibly, achieved most of his aims.

The Home Guard was formally stood down on 3 December 1944, with all danger of invasion now past. When Tom Wintringham died suddenly in 1949, aged 51, he was almost a forgotten man, his death hardly registering on the nation. His life did, though.

*

Sources:

Home Guard socialism by Stephen Cullen (Allotment Hut Booklets, 2006)

Waiting for Hitler by Midge Gillies (Hodder, 2006)

The last English revolutionary by Hugh Purcell (Sutton, 2004)

History Today 10 October 2004

Morning Star 14 March 2006

www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-real-dads-army

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20050905.shtml

www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/tahistory/9588817.how-bradford-boy-priestley-took-on-churchill-over-war/

https://spartacus-educational.com/Jwinteringham.htm